The Effectiveness of Communication Strategy Explored in African Shared Values Campaign

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Date

2014-11

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

Campaign is commonly used in social, political, as well as economic contexts. From product to idea campaigns calling the target for action are part of our lives these days. Influencing and persuading people to increase their understanding and action is gaining consid erable attention in national as well as international campaigns. Of the many instruments to achieve such a lofty goal in campaign is communication strategy. This study primarily focused on the assessment of the communication strategy employed by a particular campaign - the African Shared Values (ASV) Campaign - which aimed at bringing about behavioral change in the habits of Africans towards Africanism. The study attempted to examine the effectiveness of the communication strategy employed by the ASV campaign to influence and persuade Africans "towards an integrated, peaceful, and prosperous Africa". To this end, a qualitative research method was used and data were collected through document analysis, semi-structured interview, and participant observation. Fenton Communications' Nine Laws of Successful Advocacy Communications (2009) was primarily used to analyze and di scuss the data collected. As a result of the analysis, the study identified that the prime communication strategies were found to be public dialogue assisted by social media and traditional media. Regarding their effecti veness, the analysis brought forth that the communication strategy suffers from lack of thorough research, pretesting of messages, aud ience segmentation, budgeting, assigning of relevant and appropriate expert, and monitoring and evaluation. The study identified, therefore, need for improvement in the areas of research to fin e-tune the strategy and inform the preproduction and production phase. Additionally, testing was highly recommended to ascertain the effectiveness of the strategy in relation to the target audience as segmented logically. Above all, all ocation of adequate budget and deployment of relevant professionals were found to be very crucial for meaningful result-oriented communication in campaign.

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African Shared Values Campaign

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